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Fordham Center on Religion and Culture GLOBALIZATION AND THE ECOLOGY OF CARING: UNTOLD STORIES; UNSUNG HEROES
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus Pope Auditorium, 113 West 60th Street November 10, 2010
Moderator William F. Baker The Claudio Aquaviva Chair and Journalist in Residence at Fordham; President Emeritus, Channel Thirteen/WNET.
Speaker: Fred de Sam Lazaro Journalist and Filmmaker; Director, Project for Under- Told Stories, St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota.
Panelists Jacqueline Novogratz Founder & CEO, Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture firm that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solving global poverty.
Lawrence MacDonald Vice President, Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to reducing global poverty.
To view the video segments referenced in this transcript, please go here:
PETER STEINFELS: Good evening. Welcome to the Forum on Globalization and the Ecology of Caring. I am Peter Steinfels, Co-Director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, which has organized this evening’s Forum, but which has done so in collaboration and in connection with a larger and quite extraordinary event.
To say a few words about this larger event, I am happy to introduce an appropriately extraordinary individual. Please welcome the President of Fordham University, Father Joseph McShane.
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FATHER JOSEPH McSHANE: Thank you, Peter, for your appropriate introduction, a far-too-generous introduction. On behalf of the whole University, especially the Board of Trustees, represented particularly ably this evening by our Board Chair, John Tognino, over here, and representing our West Coast Board members, John Kriss, over here, it is a great honor and a grace for me to welcome you to this evening’s Forum.
As Peter told you, the Forum is sponsored by our Center on Religion and Culture, but it is also this evening sponsored by the whole University. Why? A couple of years ago, the University was invited by the Opus Prize Foundation, a foundation headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to partner with them in searching for and identifying suitable worthy candidates for the Opus Prize.
The Opus Prize is the most extraordinary prize for humanitarianism in the world. Through the generosity of the Opus Prize Foundation, a gift or a prize of $1 million is given to an extraordinary person or organization who leads a faith-based initiative to somewhere in the world but works in obscurity and has entrepreneurial skill, so that the work that they are doing can be carried on into the future. As part of the work that goes into the location, the nomination, and finally the spotlighting of the award winner, the University engaged in a very long process where we had two different groups working with us.
One were the spotters. They were men and women throughout the world which we engaged and who worked with us to identify men and women working in faith-based environments who were doing precisely what the Opus Prize Foundation wanted to honor.
Then we had a jury, a blue-ribbon jury, who reviewed all of the nominations that came in from all over the world. They chose a slate of finalists. Then we sent other spotters out to go and see how the work of the men and women who were nominated went forward on the ground.
This was for the University a most extraordinary undertaking and, as I said at the beginning, a great grace, because the University got to know pretty well men and women all over the world who have given their lives to the service of others and who are making a difference in the lives of the poorest of the poor, those men and women whom the world
3 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture would sooner forget. After two years of very hard work, we came down to the two finalists. The two finalists are with us this evening. I will introduce them briefly here. You will be, over the course of the next two days, invited by us really to increase spiritually on what you learn from them, because these very humble finalists are saints rich in spirit, rich in hope, and they transform the world in the work that they do.
The first is Sister Beatrice Chipeta, who is over here. She is a Sister of the Holy Rosary. Sister Beatrice is from Malawi. She works in Malawi. If you go online, if you Google her, you will learn all about what she does. This is a woman who seems to have endless energy and who has a network of orphanages and also a network of educational centers all throughout Malawi. She feeds and cares for 10,000 people a year on a regular basis, and she does it with great hope and with I would say great trust in God that she would have what she needs to do the work that God has given her. She is an amazing person. This is her first visit to New York. She has been adopted by a parish in the Diocese of Syracuse, and she will meet her benefactors from Syracuse for the first time this week. [Applause]
Next to her is seated Father John Halligan, who is a Jesuit, who is a member of the New York Province but who has spent most of his life in Quito, Ecuador. He is a native of the South Bronx, from St. John’s Episcopal Parish, and went to Fordham Prep, something that we forgive him for this evening. [Laughter]
He has been in Ecuador now for forty-eight years. He began a shoeshine boys’ operation many, many years ago so that he could reach out to and really redeem the poor boys who lived and worked on the streets in Quito. Now, after all these years of working, he has the Working Boys’ Center, which is an educational operation and a trade school operation. He has been remarkable in what he has done. He is so remarkable that he convinced a non-missionary order of nuns from Dubuque, Iowa, to break their rule and become missionaries with him in Quito.
This is John Halligan. John, stand please. [Applause] Ladies and gentlemen, the occasion for this evening’s Forum is our honoring of these two modern-day saints, and their lives invite us to reflect upon globalization and the ecology of caring in the 21st century. On behalf of the University, I welcome you and I thank you for being part of our celebration of these two remarkable saints. [Applause]
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PETER STEINFELS: Thank you very much. Before turning over this evening’s Forum to its moderator, let me beg, plead, or command everyone to silence their cell phones or any other noise-making devices. The pencils and index cards that you found at your places are there for your questions. Please write those questions, please write them legibly, at any time in the course of the discussion this evening and hold them up, and our student assistants who are posted on the sides will collect them at that time and one by one bring them forward for the last segment of the Forum.
Many of you already know William F. Baker, for two decades the CEO of both WNET/Thirteen and WLIW/Twenty-one. At least you know him and his bowtie from his successful on-screen campaigns to keep public television here in New York on a firm financial footing. Without that, of course, nothing could have happened. With that, what happened was a long list of broadcasting achievements that brought WNET hundreds of the highest media awards, including seven Emmy awards for Bill personally, as well as election to both Broadcasting Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He knows television from both its public and commercial sides. Once upon a time in his commercial TV days, he launched the career of a talk-show host named Oprah Winfrey. Despite his successes, he did not hesitate to write a book, provocatively titled Down the Tube: An Insider’s Account of the Failure of American Television.
Besides earning a Ph.D. from Case Western University, he has received numerous honorary degrees, including one from Fordham, where we are privileged to have him since his retirement from WNET and WLIW as holder of the Claudio Aquaviva Chair and Journalist in Residence. Please welcome Bill Baker.
WILLIAM BAKER: Thank you, Peter, for that wonderful intro.
A couple things. First, I love it here at Fordham. This is a special place. I was thinking about the gorum tonight. Where else in the world could it happen but here at Fordham University? This is the kind of institution this is. Look at Father McShane, John Tognino, our Chairman — these are the kinds of people that want things like this to happen, that make them happen. Thank you for that.
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I also, believe it or not, after decades of being on television all over the world and everything, sometimes get nervous in public venues, especially after following the best speaker in the world, Father McShane. I was thinking about that here tonight, and I thought: You know, anybody that shows up to this kind of panel or this kind of event, you folks must really be special. I think that really is true. If you care about this subject, you are a very special person. So I am very glad you are here.
I am going to be saying more about two of the Forum’s distinguished panelists later when they join the discussion, Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, and Lawrence MacDonald, Vice President for Communications and Policy Outreach at the Center for Global Development. But now I’d like to introduce our first speaker, Fred de Sam Lazaro.
Fred is a close friend of mine. He is the Director of the Project for Under-Told Stories at St. John’s University in Minnesota, a program that combines international journalism and teaching. That program will be moving to St. Mary’s University, also in Minnesota, on January 1st, where Fred will be Senior Fellow at the Hendrickson Institute for Ethical Leadership.
But really most of you know Fred, and certainly I know him, as a TV star. Fred has served with the PBS NewsHour since 1985 and is a correspondent and substitute anchor for PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. He also directed films from India and the Congo for the acclaimed series Wide Angle. Fred has reported from forty-one countries — can you imagine what his passport looks like? — from Haiti to sub-Saharan Africa and across Asia. He has focused on stories that are under-reported in mainstream media outlets, including HIV-AIDS, public health and social entrepreneurship, and others. In 2004 he led the first American TV crew to report on the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Fred is the recipient, naturally, of dozens of journalism awards, an honorary doctorate, media fellowships from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Michigan. He serves on the board of directors of MinnPost and the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, where he was a graduate. Fred was born in Bangalore, India.
Whenever you have somebody from TV, rather than have Fred just come up here and sit
6 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture and talk, I think we should look at the movie. The problem is I don’t know how we’re going to look at the movie until the screen comes down. So why don’t we lower the screen and then we will look at the movie. We have a little short clip, and then I am going to talk to Fred. As the screen comes down, we are going to see a clip from one of my favorite stories, a story that ran on Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and on the NewsHour. Here’s the movie.
[Video presentation]
Let me say a couple things more about Fred. I’ve been in the media business for fifty years. A lot of people on TV are often in real not exactly the way they come across on television. Fred is the real deal. He is really an exceptional human being all the way down — not only what you see on TV, but everything else. Fred, congratulations and welcome.
I think it’s appropriate we started with this piece about a Jesuit priest here at a Jesuit university. In your travels all over the world with that fat passport of yours, do you find often stories like this? A lot of the stories you have done have wound up being on faith- based subjects. Is that usually the case?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It’s quite frequent that you find faith-based enterprises, if you will. I chose this one in deference to our setting today. The Jesuits have an enormous civic footprint in India, where I grew up, and in many of the countries that I visit. I learned about Father McGuire while visiting a different Jesuit in Zambia. They have been pioneers at this kind of breaking the mold, trying something new, taking some risks. It is not infrequent that you find this.
WILLIAM BAKER: How did you get started doing this, Fred?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: I’ll more than answer that in a few words. I’ve always liked telling these types of stories, inspired in many ways by some of the examples like Father McGuire’s. Incidentally, if anyone followed Obama’s trip to India earlier this week, you’ll notice that the first stop that they made was at a school called St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, which is an age-old and much revered Jesuit institution.
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It’s a really high honor to be here. I wanted to say that first of all. I also wanted to thank Bill Baker while we’re about praising people. It is he who began Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, which commissioned the story about Father McGuire.
WILLIAM BAKER: Thank you. FRED DE SAM LAZARO: How did I get started doing this? At PBS we like to think that we have a little more heft and depth and we are looking for niches, journalistically speaking, to make sure that we are more thorough. We almost have a complex about it.
I was in Indonesia last year. The fixer that we had hired in Indonesia — these are the people that you hire to make your local arrangements, interpret for you — kept introducing us to everyone as “a crew from CBS.” After a couple of days of this, it got under my skin. I pulled him aside and I said, “Listen, it’s PBS, it’s not CBS.” He said, “Oh, I knew it was something-BS.” [Laughter] He seemed to sort of nail it.
But it is PBS. In answer to your question, Bill, PBS has an enabling environment that allows you to take news seriously. If you have that basic philosophy, it’s inherently global, and you go out there and try to find these stories under a rock. When I look at how difficult this used to be, the major hurdle was getting the financial resources to produce this kind of material. The advent of digital technology and miniature technology has made the production costs come down enormously.
We have been able also to sell some of this material to multiple noncompeting news organizations, which is something that we never thought about before. This is not a huge market. Most of them are within the public broadcasting realm. But that helps pay the bills. We do rely —
WILLIAM BAKER: This film ran on the NewsHour and on Religion and Ethics both, right?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Both of them shared the freight.
WILLIAM BAKER: And maybe several other places?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: This particular one ran on two of them. I’ve had similar
8 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture content on as many as four different outlets, including NPR and HDNET. So there’s a shared freight. There’s some philanthropic funding. The Skoll Foundation supports our coverage of social entrepreneurship through a grant to The NewsHour.
I’m based on a college campus. All of a sudden, we are discovering that this is sort of a plain-spoken but very compelling teaching tool in the classroom. It makes a lot of this content much more relevant.
That leaves one little challenge, and that is to make stories from the distant world relevant to an American audience. If you think about the NewsHour, imagine the NewsHour as a Bible, we would typically be writing in the Book of Job. There are a lot of people suffering, and it’s not exactly something that is going to lure an audience or maintain an audience. The big challenge is: How do you produce content that people are going to tune in to or stay tuned for?
One of the approaches that has helped us enormously is what I like to call solutions- oriented journalism: Let’s find people who are at the forefront of a problem, have a bright idea to attack the problem, and let’s go use a strong character-driven narrative to tell a story. So have it be solutions-oriented, and people will come in. People like to watch things that are success stories. That is what we inherently do.
Typically, a news editor will ask the deadliest question for this kind of content. You’re covering poverty. The first question is, “What’s new?” There’s nothing really new about poverty, and if it’s not new it’s not news.
The second question that a good editor asks is, “So what?” So what if we flushed cleaner water down our toilets today in this room and 2 billion people drink that every day? It’s sort of an interesting, depressing fact, but what do you do with that information?
So tell us stories that are solutions-oriented. That is what we are using, strong character- driven narratives with people who are doing something about it and having some success. We have to have a bar that people have to cross beyond a good idea. They need to be actually doing something that is showing results and good outcomes.
I love going at stories with a different perspective. Very shortly I’m going to ask Ryan to
9 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture queue up a piece that we did about a physicians’ Peace Corps, if you will, in Malawi. I’m so thrilled that we have a Malawi nominee here, because we are going to go back and see images of Malawi.
But one of the lesser-known facts about American medicine is that in any given year, Bill, one out of every five physicians minted in this country and brought into our health-care system is a graduate of an overseas medical school, frequently and mostly from countries that are poor. This is an attempt by one social entrepreneur based at Baylor College of Medicine to try and address this problem by creating a Peace Corps for doctors. Without much further ado, we’ll watch an excerpt from this piece.
[Video presentation]
WILLIAM BAKER: That’s another incredibly powerful piece that Fred did.
Fred and I talked about this next question because this almost sounds like a racist question, but I think it’s an important question for us to talk about. That is, when you see pieces, particularly on American television, like this it is often white Americans doing good for people of color someplace else. What does all that mean and how do you deal with that issue?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It is a consideration that we have to take into account. We are hypersensitive, especially in PBS, about appearances. We are, after all, in the appearance business. So it is a dilemma that we grapple with. That stereotype doesn’t represent the —
WILLIAM BAKER: That doesn’t diminish the wonderful good these folks are doing, of course.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Yes. It doesn’t really represent the larger body of work. But what someone like Father McGuire or Mark Klein or any one of the doctors — and we picked the doctors from a rainbow, as you’ll notice, the young American doctors, for that purpose. We could have picked several others, but it’s certainly a consideration. But then you have to deal with the relevance bit. There’s a cultural interpretation, where we say, “These are people who are going to help us tell the story far more effectively.”
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One of the sad facts of life is if somebody speaks with an accent, for example, that people don’t understand at first blush, the power of that story is diminished. So it’s a consideration. It’s a tough one, but it’s one that we just really have to hope that the overall thrust of the story overcomes that concern about stereotyping. And of course it’s the truth in this case. In this microcosm it’s a very powerful story telling us about some profoundly important issues.
We’ll break that stereotype and go to the next video, if I may. This is a story that helps, I think, address the whole “So what’s new?” question. We are always looking for ideas that are just very unusual. This next excerpt is from something called the Barefoot College, which is in the Rajasthan Desert in India. Its mission is to train middle-aged women to become solar engineers. These are women from across the rural developing world and from villages that have never been close to an electric grid. Let’s take a look at the excerpt for now.
[Video presentation]
WILLIAM BAKER: See, Jean-Marie, there’s a place for you. The power of women. Jean-Marie is my wife and she is an example. She started a clinic for the homeless mentally ill when she was a grandmother. At any rate, the power of women, is that often a theme that you find all over the world in this kind of work that you do, Fred?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Absolutely. I think to a person everyone who works in development — and we’ll hear, I hope, more from Jacqueline Novogratz in a little bit, because I was at her investors’ gathering yesterday — will tell you that you get so much more bang for the buck when you invest in women, because women do most of the heavy lifting — and I mean that literally, whether it’s firewood or water — and they are in charge of child rearing almost exclusively. So if you put a dollar into a woman’s hands, it goes almost immediately to the nutrition or education of the children, which is not the case with men.
If you know anything about Bangladesh, one of the major institutions there has been the Grameen Bank. You’ve probably heard of the micro-lending organizations there that have transformed the lives of millions and created millions of entrepreneurs, between
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Grameen and another organization called BRAC. Invariably, these women, who have never spent a day in a school, are sending their girls to college.
How did this transformation happen? It didn’t happen overnight. One of the hallmarks of many of the successful entrepreneurs, Bill, is that they are happy to work gradually and work with men, as opposed to challenging the existing mores. It just evolved so seamlessly and organically.
In this conservative Muslim country like Bangladesh, it’s just not unusual at all to find these young women going to college and beyond. So the transformation has come, but it hasn’t come in a confrontational manner, it’s not revolutionary in that sense, and that is one of the hallmarks, I think, of successful entrepreneurs. So yes, if you invest in women, the payoff is going to be that much more.
WILLIAM BAKER: What a powerful thing. That really is something to think about, it really is. And you heard it here. What about a big finish before we bring on our next panelists?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: We are running short on time, and so we’ll skip one of the videos that I had in our lineup, but I will paraphrase some of the things that you might have heard in it, because it talks about an important aspect of how these kinds of enterprises might evolve. It is also a qualifier journalistically. What’s newsworthy about these? Beyond the fact that they are interesting, cute stories in some cases, good stories, what’s the next step?
The next big concern is how replicable are these models; how scalable are they — and scaling-up is a huge issue. One of the stories —You can get all of our stories, by the way, on undertoldstories.org.
The Aravind Eye Clinic is a story that I first did in 1989 when it was an up-and-coming organization. It began as a six-bed hospital in a small city in south India. Today Aravind performs, gosh, I don’t know how many cataract surgeries, but I think they do see a million patients a year. They have performed 4 million cataract surgeries. Cataract blindness is a very, very pervasive problem in South Asia.
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This is an organization that grew from a six-bed hospital into the largest eye-care provider in the world, that has an error rate comparable to the Mayo Clinic’s. It is an exemplary organization. That is sort of the next step: how do you scale this up so you have a really widespread impact?
I want to talk a little bit about another hallmark of enterprises like Aravind, because not only have they become so successful, but they don’t guard their secrets. They are completely, as they say in the software business, open source. Anybody who wants to find out what the ingredients are to their success is welcome to look them up. They’ll tell you how much they charge patients. They’ll tell you about their entire business model. They are a completely open book.
The second thing that they do that is so important is to listen to the people that they are serving. These people provide assistance to patients to enable these impoverished people to come in for surgery without burdening their families. They have to provide transportation to them and hand-holding in a culturally competent manner. It’s very important to respect the communities that you are serving.
This really came to light, impressed me, or came into high relief in covering the guinea worm campaign that the Carter Center has headed around the world. The Carter Center has led the effort to eradicate the work of guinea worm, which is a Biblical scourge. It’s called the “fiery serpent” in the Old Testament.
There are only four countries in the world where it is left, where it still exists. One of the ways in which the Carter Center has worked so successfully — and they’ll likely eradicate it in two years — one of the things that they have done is they have incorporated local belief systems. It sounds so simple, but it’s counterintuitive to a lot of development experts. They have worked with local communities to incorporate the belief systems.
So when initially they would go into villages in many parts of Africa and they had wanted to spray the open ponds that serve as water sources for people, there was resistance at the local level, because these were sacred ponds. This is the source of life in the village. They felt threatened by the prospect of spraying poison into these.
What the Carter Center’s approach has been is to go in there and incorporate that
13 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture theology that belief system if you will, and they say: “You know, your sacred water source has a curse on it. We have an idea for how we might eradicate that curse in partnership with you.” It’s a mind shift, and it has worked.
WILLIAM BAKER: And respect.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And it’s respect. Don Hopkins, who is a doctor at the Carter Center, said, “People have a very keen sense for condescension, a keen ear for it, and they know it.” It has been top-down in much of the assistance. So respect and partnership is another important ingredient when you are dealing with attacking poverty.
Going hand in hand, Bunker Roy will tell you, is you have to provide autonomy at the most decentralized level as possible. If you are going to give people solar panels in a village, don’t set up a center that distributes these, that has a lot of panels and then radiates literally to different households. Put a panel on every roof, so that everybody who owns the panel and the house is in control of their energy source. So having autonomy at the most decentralized level is something that people say is very, very important. These are people who have a lot of political savvy, and media savvy as well. They work very effectively.
Sunitha Krishnan is an anti-trafficking activist in India who has shone a huge media spotlight on the police departments and partnered now with them to go in and do brothel raids. The police are notoriously corrupt in these places. But she works very, very effectively and cleverly to get around this.
Mechai Viravaidya in Thailand works with religious leaders in condom campaigns. This may not work well in a Catholic country, but in a Buddhist country it worked very effectively to have religious leadership bless campaigns. So these people are extremely worldly in that sense, in understanding the political landscape and taking advantage of opportunities when they see them. Finally, these people are willing to break out of the old-fashioned thinking about altruism and philanthropy.
I want to show you a tiny clip, which will also serve to introduce one of our panelists, and show you an example from Kenya. A guy named David Kuria, a civil servant, good heart,
14 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture wanted to start a nonprofit to bring sanitation to slum dwellers in Nairobi. Jacqueline’s Acumen Fund dissuaded him, coaxed him and helped him develop a business plan and started a for-profit. The rest, as they say, is making history. Let’s watch a small clip from that piece.
[Video presentation]
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: One of my signal achievements is to get a story about toilets on a dinnertime television program. I must thank Jacqueline for making that possible really, because you have to do it in a manner that gives you that context, gives you a reason — although I did take a bit of heat for doing toilets during the dinner hour. But the dignity of sanitation is beyond so many people in the world. What I did not manage to get on TV is an update on how David Kuria is doing. So, with not much ado, let’s listen to — we’ll share this just amongst ourselves.
[Video presentation]
WILLIAM BAKER: Fred, thank you for your incredible body of work, and we’re counting on much more to come. He’s really special. Don’t you leave. We’re going to bring on the other panelists.
While we are bringing them on, you have a little surprise for everybody. The other panelists can come on up.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: This is a little coda that I wanted to bring to you. You remember Kushmita Biswa Karma from the original piece. Her story has an interesting twist. She was sort of taken in by a family in Germany, because she had such extraordinary talent, and qualified to get into one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world, the Richard Strauss Conservatorium in Munich. We caught up with her one year later. I just want to show you a little bit of how good coaching can improve her musicality. She is going to do great things in life. Let’s roll the Kushmita piece if we could. Two minutes.
WILLIAM BAKER: The last piece. [Glitch in video presentation]
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FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Sorry about this.
WILLIAM BAKER: We’ll find it eventually, I hope. Let me now introduce our other panelists.
In 2001 Jacqueline Novogratz founded the Acumen Fund, an international not-for-profit that uses targeted investments and entrepreneurial methods to deal with global poverty. She had previously founded the Philanthropy Workshop and the New Generation Leadership Program at the Rockefeller Foundation. With an MBA from Stanford, she had begun her work in international banking at Chase Manhattan and founded a micro- finance institution in Rwanda.
Lawrence MacDonald spent fifteen years as a correspondent and editor before serving as Senior Communications Officer at the World Bank, where he provided information for the Bank’s chief economist and oversaw its research publications, creating new online tools, including the International AIDS Economic Network. Since 2004 he has been Vice President at the Center for Global Development, an independent not-for-profit research organization dedicated to making globalization work for the poor.
Please welcome our two additional panelists.
Jacqueline, one of the stories that Fred showed was really about an organization that you funded. Would you care to comment about that or anything else that you’ve seen so far?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Sure. First of all, I just thank you also for having me here tonight. It’s really wonderful to be here.
I discovered last night that my grandfather actually went to Fordham for both undergraduate and law school. A smart man. My mother was very excited to know that I was going to be here tonight.
I actually started Acumen Fund because, as you said, I had seen through banking in the early 1980s how the markets failed to reach the very poor, and in the late 1980s in Rwanda I particularly saw the failings of traditional development, and too often traditional charity as well, particularly top-down solutions that often created dependence
16 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture or made things worse for the very poor.
Public sanitation in Kenya is a real example, where you are looking at a country of more than 35 million people, and one out of two people in Kenya don’t have access to healthy sanitation. In the 1980s, when I lived in Kenya, government was trying to provide public sanitation. But the toilets were typically very dirty, extremely dangerous, not places you would ever go.
So when Kuria talks about starting with the wealthier, it was largely because he needed to change people’s attitudes around going into public toilets altogether. So when he came to us and he had this wonderfully well-intended non-profit, we didn’t feel confident that he was actually ever going to scale and make a difference beyond one or two toilets, which we had seen way too many times before. So we worked with him, as Fred said, for more than eighteen months, developing a business plan that we thought could really take off. We invested in it, not knowing obviously what was going to happen.
It has been extraordinary to see this year between 6 and 7 million people will use those toilets. And now it is being seen as a model to bring to Tanzania and to Kenya. So a real power of what we call patient capital, investing in entrepreneurs knowing that it might take ten or twelve years before these things really take off. If we get our capital back, we think that’s pretty great, to create really serious change that can sustain itself over time.
WILLIAM BAKER: And I guess you really are getting your capital back in many cases, right?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Yes. Right now we have invested about $50 million in fifty organizations in Pakistan, India, Tanzania, and Kenya, including Aravind, which Fred referred to. They are actually doing about 280,000 cataract surgeries a year for those million.
What has been fascinating is for every dollar we invest we are bringing in an additional $4. So we are seeing about $250 million now at work in those companies. This year alone we will touch 40 million people and have created 35,000 jobs in healthcare, housing, water, alternative energy, and agricultural inputs. So the model is starting to work. If you valued the money that we have put out to date, we feel extremely confident
17 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture that we will get 90 percent of it back.
WILLIAM BAKER: That’s amazing.
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: In the best case, we will get 120 percent of it back. My belief is that if we get anywhere from minus-20 to positive-20 and see the kind of significant, sustainable change that we’re beginning to witness, it’s a pretty great return on the philanthropic dollar.
WILLIAM BAKER: Jacqueline, I don’t know how this fellow did it with the toilets, because I have some experience in that business myself. I was on the board of the 34th Street Partnership, and we installed a public toilet in Herald Square here in New York. It was one of those modern fancy ones. And boy, did we have a lot of trouble, including people going inside, getting caught in there, and not coming out. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there.
Larry, your enterprise really does the big thinking about this — the public policy, all of that kind of work. Is there a way really to stop this poverty without changing governments, without changing the capitalistic and economic systems of the world? What does your research tell you?
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: I’m glad you gave me the easy question. I also want to thank Peter Steinfels and the Center on Religion and Culture for inviting me and to say how thrilled I am to be on this panel.
Fred, I could watch your stories all night. It’s really very inspiring. Storytelling about inspiring individuals is, I think, a crucial way to make the struggles of poor people real to people in the United States and other countries, where that kind of deprivation is really quite hard for many of us to imagine.
Thinking about the theme of this evening, the ecology of caring, I think that these saints — they’re really living saints — who do this kind of work have a particular niche in the world. But we can’t all be polar bears and we can’t all be saints. The ecology is big. There are a lot of different ways to interact in the world.
18 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture
I am thinking that many of us in this room, while we admire work like that and we might be able to support it financially, are probably not in a position to do that. Maybe some of you out there, maybe some of the younger ones — and I hope that they will.
As we reflect about our role in helping to reduce poverty, it is very important to think that there are many things about the global system that are unjust. There are decisions that we, as citizens of the United States, have an input into that can make life harder or easier for very poor people. I’m thinking of three. I’ll just mention three examples.
One is trade. Right now our markets to the very poorest countries are 97 percent open. It happens that the 3 percent that is not open is stuff they could actually make and sell to us. So it’s all very well and good to have small enterprises, the micro-enterprises, but what these people really need are jobs. If we would open our markets to things like T-shirts, which they could actually manufacture, that would be helpful.
Another is migration. Migration reform in this country, as you know, is hugely contentious. But the opportunity for people to come and work, even on temporary visas, legally in this country can be a huge infusion of wealth into their societies and an opportunity for them to learn and acquire skills. This is something that I think we ought to be speaking up for.
Finally, climate change. Much of this good work is literally going to be washed away if we can’t get a handle on climate. The United States right now is the major impediment to global action to reduce climate change.
So I would say we should look into ourselves, understand that there are injustices that we are part of, and then look for opportunities in our small way to try and address those.
WILLIAM BAKER: Thank you, Larry. By the way, too, I want to remind you all that there are these little cards. Don’t count on me for the best questions. They will come from you. So please write your questions down and pass them to the edge and we’ll be happy to get them up here.
For the whole panel, for the people sitting in this audience, obviously people who care — for our entire panel, what can they do? You answered it a little bit, Larry, but Jacqueline,
19 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture
Fred, Larry?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: I’m going to be brief, because as a journalist our mission sort of stops on getting people to — it’s as I said yesterday, not to create a better world, but to create a better informed world. We ask the “So what?” not the “So what to do?” question. The “So what to do?” question happens in classrooms, it happens with these folks, and especially the people that you support. My job is just making these stories relevant and making these issues have some connective tissue to the lives of young people in central Minnesota, for example, to create a sense of relevance. These guys know a lot more about how to engage people.
WILLIAM BAKER: Jacqueline?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Well, Fred, as usual is being too modest, because I actually think one of the most important things that we can do, especially as Americans, is to get smarter about the issues and about how our actions impact people around the world. A lot of what you do, Fred, is connected to that, whether it is global warming or issues of immigration. So I would say the first thing is to get knowledgeable.
The second thing is to develop better systems of metrics about what works and what doesn’t work and get a lot more honest about the way that we calculate the impact of what it is that we are doing. I think that too often we think that charity is about good intentions and just doing. In fact, as the world gets complicated, more interconnected, we’ve really got to hold ourselves accountable to the actual effect of what it is that we are doing.
Third is, obviously, supporting things that do work financially, but also with our voices. What’s so exciting through social media and the new technologies that we have is that every one of us can be a real agent for change, a real advocate. I tell young people that I meet with these days that you can actually wake up in the morning and decide that you’re going to change the world and do it. We are starting to see that.
I have this book. Fred was there, where one of our young fellows in Nairobi was approached by a third-grade-educated, HIV-positive young man, unemployed, who wanted to understand what he was doing. The guy gave him my book. This young man,
20 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture who really has truly what we would consider nothing, has since created a book club for 100 people.
They all read the book. They all decided that they too wanted to be part of bridging the gap between rich and poor. We didn’t know if we should tell them, “You are the poor.” They don’t see themselves really that way. Since then, they have created a business plan competition and they are mobilizing the community.
I think that we really underestimate what each of us can do. With the technology that we have at hand, just in terms of getting to know each other, it has taken that “can do” piece to a whole different level.
WILLIAM BAKER: Larry, do you have anything more you’d like to add?
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: I agree with both Fred and Jackie. I would add don’t underestimate your own power. You’re sitting in the middle of the most powerful city in the world. You all have friends and can influence people. In our work at the Center, we talk to politicians, people in the administration, people on Capitol Hill. One thing that we hear very often is, “Well, you know, we’d really like to do this, but we’re not hearing from our constituents. We don’t hear that people think that this is important.”
I think that has changed, in part through the work of organizations like the One Campaign, that have organized mass emailing and petitioning. But I think it’s not only that.
I think it’s individuals talking to people they know. We do a lot of social media. I actually think that the most social media, face-to-face conversation, continues to be the most effective. Getting informed through stories, talking to people you know, and letting our elected representatives know that you care about these issues and that you want U.S. policy to take into account the impact of our actions not only on our own society but on people beyond our shores, and especially the least protected and poorest people in the world.
WILLIAM BAKER: A question for again the whole panel. We’ll start with Fred. Fred, a lot of your stories and a lot of the work that we see, this incredible selfless work, is often
21 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture done by people of faith. It strikes me that faith-based has its positives and its negatives. There are obstacles and there are contributions. I’d be interested in any thoughts you might have in that area.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: They’re rather narrow, because my experience with faith- based organizations has been textured, shall we say. They break down between the old-line Jesuits, Salesians, Redemptorists, and many Protestant denominations, the old-line Anglican type of people. I’m talking about my upbringing in India and most of my experience working with people. These are folks who are really getting fingernails dirty and doing a lot of risk-taking in many ways, and being very, very bold.
I mentioned that I found out about Father McGuire. It was while waiting for a priest named Father Pete Henriot in Lusaka, who is a real rabble-rouser in Zambia. At the time — this was in 2004 — in the midst of a lot of famine in the region in southern Africa, Zambia decided that it would not accept U.S. food aid, which was coming in in the form of grain, but it was genetically modified. It was on those grounds that this was rejected. If you listen to talk radio in this country and elsewhere, you’d say, “My God, are these people insane? What’s wrong with the government?”
Well, behind that policy was this Jesuit by the name of Father Pete Henriot. He and another Jesuit, named Roland Lesseps, were coming at this completely differently, because they said, “If we accept U.S. grain, we will no longer export to Europe, which has a ban on genetically modified imports of food.” It was a real dilemma for the government.
These Jesuits were just basically saying, “Listen, here is a demonstration project” — and they took us to it. They said, “Organic is the way to go. Here is this woman who is feeding seventeen people in her household by just changing her practices.”
They think outside of the box. They think in new directions. They do enormously good work. They can be controversial at times. They get into trouble with the church as well at times, with the Vatican — I think these two gentlemen did.
I think also that there is a great deal of evangelical church planting, if you will, in a good
22 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture part of the developing world where I have reported from. That is controversial, especially in areas that have Hindu majorities or Muslim majorities, because the allegation is that “these folks are trying to convert our people and there are strings attached.” So it’s a little bit controversial. The reaction from the antagonists is to paint all Christians with one broad brush, as being proselytizers. This can be very, very controversial.
But I think when you get down to the grassroots, to the individual villages, these people are just selfless, revered people, courageous people, who not only live in very Spartan conditions, but they live dangerously
WILLIAM BAKER: Jackie, any thoughts you have about religion and faith-based organizations doing good works?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Yes. I would absolutely agree with what Fred said. I think it’s a huge opportunity. We really always look at distribution and how do we go beyond the thousands to the hundreds of thousands or millions. Faith-based organizations, churches, often represent enormous opportunity for distribution. I write about it in my book as well. Any institution is made up of people. Sometimes the politics can take over too.
Where we have run into problems, both in Pakistan with imams as well as in Rwanda with the ministers, is when a more political person wants to control the flock. It has been particularly interesting around issues of usury and this idea that even a very, very low interest rate is something that is not allowed. The religious official will sometimes stand in the way of the person taking control of her — it’s always a her — own destiny. Those have been some of the bigger fights that we’ve had — but on an individual basis, rather than on an institutional basis, but an individual who used the institution for political purposes. So I think that is where it’s like any other kind of organization. It depends on who the individual is.
But I think that what Fred is talking about is really our experience as well, particularly people who want to distribute.
What has been interesting to me is how many phone calls we are starting to get from leaders of faith-based organizations that want to move away from pure charity models
23 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture only to thinking about some of the more sustainable approaches. So we are in pretty interesting conversations around that, again in the Muslim world as well as in Christian- based organizations.
WILLIAM BAKER: Interesting. Larry?
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: People of faith and faith communities have, I think, two ways that they can get involved in making the world a better place.
One of the stories that Fred tells — hands on, getting dirty fingernails, rolling up the sleeves — and that work is very important. It also lends itself nicely to stories. But there is another aspect of faith community involvement. Within this country it goes back at least as far as the Abolitionist movement, which was led largely by religious groups. More recently, in the civil rights movement, religious groups were active in that. And most recently, around the turn of the millennium, including the Catholic Church being very active in the Millennium Debt Relief Campaign. I think of this as the prophetic role of speaking out.
In my community in Virginia, there is now an interfaith movement organized by the Industrial Areas Foundation, which has brought together about forty congregations — I belong to one of those congregations; it includes Muslims, Christians of various stripes, and Jews — to petition local officials and ask them for specific actions to address poverty within Virginia.
I think that kind of interfaith action, that the skills and interests that people in religious communities have to engage in open dialogue, in listening dialogue — and also, by the way, to fill the seats and turn out the votes and demonstrate to the politicians that people who vote care about these issues can be very powerful.
So as important as it is to do this work on the ground, I think that we shouldn’t think that that’s the only thing that people of faith can do. I think there is a lot to be done on the prophetic side here in this country.
WILLIAM BAKER: Fred, do you have something to add?
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FRED DE SAM LAZARO: I just wanted to add most of what we are talking about and looking at here are the slow-moving disasters, the day-in and day-out mundane stuff. I wanted to add that when it comes to the immediate natural disaster/catastrophe kinds of things, or places that are really dangerous, the faith-based organizations have the distribution systems and the infrastructure that is just so, so critical.
You mentioned that I went to Darfur in 2004. I should add that we did that under the auspices of an organization called Islamic Relief, which took us into places. There’s nothing like the cover of a big white flag with a mosque on it to protect you from who knows what as you’re driving through the desert there.
But we also worked with the Mormons, believe it or not. The Mormons had a partnership with Islamic Relief in which they were supplying food to them.
I said, “Wow! Do you do this in other places?”
They said, “Yes. We do North Korea, we do East Timor” — and I forget what the other theater was. But they do this without any publicity, very, very quietly. This is what they want to do, is they want to get food into these warehouses to help others distribute it. But they don’t want their name on any of it. They don’t want their fingerprints. This is just what they do internally.
So there are some extraordinary stories like that. Their role, the role of faith-based organizations, in disaster relief cannot be discounted.
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Yes.
WILLIAM BAKER: One last question from me before we take some questions from our audience. That is again for all three of you. We’ll start with you, Larry. That is governments, the role of corrupt government. How do you deal with that, and how critical is the role of these corrupt governments and kleptocratic governments in leading this world of ours into a tailspin?
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: That’s an excellent question. You’re going to begin to think I sound like a broken record, but I think even with the role of kleptocrats in other
25 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture countries, it is useful to begin looking initially at home to what we can do about that.
One of the things that we can do is to make it more difficult for them to stash their stolen assets in rich countries. This is actually making some progress. There is an initiative which the U.S. government has been actively engaged in that will be announced at the G20 meeting in Seoul, an anti-corruption initiative. It is the first time since the G20 was created in response to the financial crisis that the twenty most powerful, largest economies in the world will address issues of governance. They are going to do things like saying that they will not provide safe haven to corrupt dictators that are fleeing and that they will assist in the recovery of stolen assets.
Corrupt governments in other places are a problem. We’ve got plenty of our own problems with corruption at home here. But I think that that’s an example where civil society groups, some of them not actually very large, have been pointing this out and raising this issue, including civil society groups in developing countries. I reported in the Philippines when they were trying to get back the Marcos’ stolen money. In the end they got back very little.
We have seen a similar thing with the money that was stolen out of Nigeria. Very little of that is recovered.
So making it harder to stash that illegitimately, making it easier to recover, and denying safe haven to corrupt dictators when they do want to flee, I think are all steps that can be helpful.
WILLIAM BAKER: Jackie, anything you’d like to add?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Yes. We obviously work in countries that have a lot of corruption. I have two stories.
I think I have learned, particularly over the last ten years, the power of a single individual to really change systems can never be underestimated.
The first example I will give is in India, in the ambulance industry of all places. When we first starting looking in Bombay at the ambulances, 90 percent of the people in all
26 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture ambulances were dead. This is only five years ago. That’s actually not so extraordinary, because in the 1940s in the United States we had the exact same statistic. You would only call an ambulance if you were taking a family member to the morgue. For many of the same reasons — completely private, highly corrupt — the government couldn’t be relied on at all, not at all transparent.
We found these entrepreneurs, a guy named Shafi Mather, who decided he was going to do a different approach, using the market but also the public ethos of service for all, called 1298 Ambulances — bright yellow; marketing on the side so he could have a revenue base in selling to corporations.
He couldn’t even get a number. He wanted 111 or 911, but he wouldn’t pay bribes. So he got 1298, which is not really hard to remember. In fact, they called it “12 98.” At the beginning, people would look for the “12” on their telephone. In panic, they would do these things. So huge barriers.
If you went to a fancy hospital or a pay hospital, you paid. If you went to a free public clinic, you didn’t, or you could pay what you could afford.
When the terrorist attacks of November now three years ago occurred, the only ambulances that showed up consistently were the 1298 yellow ambulances. So government saw. They started winning government contracts. In doing so they realized that there was no transparent bidding process. It was an entirely corrupt industry from the bottom all the way to the top.
So Shafi and his partners took on the government and went all the way to the Supreme Court, with a group of really young lawyers, and they won. Essentially, $750 million worth of contracts went back onto the table for tender.
Long story, not that short, today they’ve got 305 ambulances running with about 850 employees. They’ve got government contracts to bring on about another 1,000 ambulances over the next year. It is becoming the model for ambulance emergency delivery in India.
The industry is getting cleaned up. Shafi has now created a second company, called
27 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture bribebusters.com, whereby you can hire him and his company to do what you need to do legally for less than it would cost you to pay bribes through the systems, as a way of really showing the world there is a different approach.
And then, if I might just quickly, because I think Pakistan is even a more complex place to work — but again, we invested in a single entrepreneur in the housing industry, Jawad Aslam, a Baltimore American who went back to Pakistan after 9/11 to build a housing development, with a lot of naiveté, which is how things often do get changed.
We invested patient capital so he had time. But he refused to pay bribes to get the land registered. It took us a year and a half just to help him register the land. But over time he was able to do that. Now there are 300 houses, 2,000 people living there. We are getting our last payment in December.
There is a single mosque in this housing development. I happened to be in Lahore last May when two mosques that were where the Ahmadis, which is a particular Islamic sect, pray, when those mosques were bombed by suicide bombers and over 100 people were senselessly massacred.
So I said to Jawad at our housing development, “How do they navigate this mosque, because Sunni and Shia and Ahmadiyya — many, many different sects live in this development?”
He said that he brought the neighbors together really over the course of the year, and ultimately they decided that they would select three imams who were the most respected in the community and they would rotate the saying of Friday prayer, but that the whole community would pray together.
What has happened since then not only is that we have a story to show what is possible on the diversity side, but the government of Punjab, now that there is real exposure to something that works, even though it’s quite small, has created an expediting unit within the housing department so that people who are serious about creating affordable housing for the poor can register without having to go through the local registrars, because that’s really where corruption occurs.
28 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture
So I give those two stories of examples. But it really surprised us even that entrepreneurs can create change where government is unjust and where corruption is too rampant. I think that is the way we are going to see more and more change, not relying on government to change itself necessarily.
WILLIAM BAKER: Fred, were you going to say something?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: I was, but I —
WILLIAM BAKER: Then I think we should let this young woman play the violin. She has been waiting so patiently. You can set that up.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: She is a lot better looking than the blank screen that would be there otherwise. I was just going to say, very briefly, in terms of corruption — and I get this question all the time — we did a piece out of southern Africa, in fact out of Malawi, about U.S. food aid. We are the biggest donor of food aid in the world and we insist that it go on U.S.-flag carriers and in the form of grain. There has been a long campaign to try to change that, to provide cash assistance that could help train and develop a market in some of these countries and help farmers there. But there is rigid opposition to it.
One of the facts that really astounded me about our food aid policy is that we have an overhead of 66 percent. In other words, for every dollar of food aid the United States provides, sixty-six cents goes toward shipping and handling. It’s an astounding fact. I was talking about this in a public forum in St. Louis last year. There were concerns being expressed, as there were in the piece, about corrupt kleptocratic governments and where would this cash go.
Somebody came up to me, a parent of one of these students, and he said, “Did you say 66 percent? And who are we calling corrupt?” So I just want to throw that out as perspective.
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: And that doesn’t count the censors we’re paying first.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Right.
29 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture
WILLIAM BAKER: Let’s let her play and then I’ll take the questions. Do you want to say anything about her again or should we just let her play?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: I think I said it all. We can just listen to her.
WILLIAM BAKER: I think we can let her play.
[Video presentation]
WILLIAM BAKER: Isn’t she something? I think in a couple of years she’ll be in my course at Julliard and Fordham learning about the business of the performing arts.
Questions now from the audience.
The first one is: “With the state of the U.S. economy, are the world’s needs dragging the U.S. down rather than the U.S. pulling the world up? And why don’t the Chinese support world social needs?”
Larry, you sound like a good one to start on with that.
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: That’s a good and difficult question.
I’ll take the Chinese part of it first. As we see not only China, but also India and Brazil, the other large emerging market economies, take a greater role on the world stage, they are beginning to take on some of these responsibilities. At the preparatory meeting for the G20 that I attended, the senior official from Brazil said they were actually ready to open their markets 100 percent — duty-free, quota-free access — for the poorest countries.
But they also have some people in their countries who would be hurt by that, some producers, and they needed cover from the United States. They needed all the countries to do this together. So in some cases I think we see them taking leadership.
The other thing to keep in mind is that in per-capita terms — I know there are many people in this country who are out of work and struggling and losing their homes — but I
30 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture think the difference in per-capita income and wealth, and also in our environmental footprint on the planet, is so huge, it’s really difficult for us to, I think, take that into account.
We hear a lot about carbon emissions from China, a new coal plant every two weeks. I actually don’t think that’s necessarily the case, but that myth is widely established. It is still the case that each one of us emits five times the carbon of a person in China and something like twenty times the carbon emissions of a person in India.
So we continue to have, I think, a particular responsibility in the world. It doesn’t mean that we have to do everything. It makes a lot of sense for us to work with others, and other nations are increasingly able to step up and take that role. But if we don’t take that role of global leadership, others will. Actually my concern about the United States is, because of the gridlock that we face here, that increasingly we are not going to be able to play the global leadership role that we played in the past. I actually think we are probably better at doing it than others. I would rather have a world order dominated by U.S. leadership than any of the other contenders out there. So I’m hoping we will be able to step up to the plate.
WILLIAM BAKER: Jackie, any thoughts?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Yes. I agree with what you’re saying, Larry. I think about this a lot. I just did a tour of universities in the South, actually a number of Christian universities. I was struck by the level of fear that goes beyond politics. I think that social inequity within a country is a really big deal. Even though I absolutely agree with what you are saying, I think that looking at people who are unemployed, who don’t see any future, and are trying to figure out how to navigate with the new normal, are starting to move from a place of fear.
I think it is incumbent on people with a global orientation to find ways to talk to the parts of this country that are reeling from what is happening in ways that are more articulate about the question that you are asking.
The progress of the developing world — it’s not a zero-sum game. It doesn’t mean that we are going to go down. I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because when you look
31 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture at Steve Jobs and you look at Apple, the initial innovation does indeed create some jobs in the United States, but pretty quickly Apple moves overseas. The beneficiaries of that company are obviously other countries and Steve and the shareholders of Apple. But the unemployed steel worker is kind of lost.
I keep thinking about how the United States needs to think more creatively and more honestly, maybe about taxing our companies for a different kind of education, for the parts of this country that feel frightened and are being left behind.
The stories that we tell are both not honest enough and I think are missing the nuance that social inequity within nations — and this is why South Africa was such a big deal. The first time I went to South Africa after working in the Nairobi slums, I think, “Soweto’s not so bad, it kind of looks middle-class.” But compared to the whites it was a really big deal, social inequity within South Africa.
Well, we have to think about that within our country and cross national borders and create a more complicated story that’s not so complicated that it overwhelms us. I think that is one of our big challenges today.
WILLIAM BAKER: Larry, you had an add?
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: Yes. I’d like to build on that. I think you have hit on something very important, which is the high levels of inequality. One of the things my Center does is we produce an index of how well high-income countries do in supporting development. We find that the Nordic countries, which have among the highest levels of equality — or I should say maybe the lowest levels of inequality — also tend to be very generous. We see a pretty strong correspondence between countries that have very high levels of inequality and suspicion of the outside world and a sort of general stinginess.
Although the United States is the biggest foreign aid provider in absolute numbers, we are obviously in the lower half of the distribution, very small in per-capita terms and in terms of the size of our economy. I think that is because of our very high levels of inequality.
By the way, high levels of inequality also happen to be very bad for economic growth. So there are a lot of reasons that it is in our own interest, and I think the kind of society I
32 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture would like to live in, to pursue policies that would reduce the levels of inequality in the United States. There is a debate going on right now that relates directly to that. It includes better support for lower-income people in terms of education and health, and I think it also includes more equitable — my personal view is that it includes more equitable taxation.
But as long as we have these very high and increasing levels of inequality, I don’t think we are going to be a very generous nation. That is borne out by what we see in cross-country comparisons.
WILLIAM BAKER: By the way, another sidebar statistic: those Nordic countries also have the highest per-capita support for public television, just kind of an interesting point. Fred, do you want to add anything to this discussion.
LAWRENCE MACDONALD: They have high levels of trust of government, incidentally, too. They believe that government can be a force for good.
WILLIAM BAKER: Yes, correct.
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: I just got into a debate like that, because we are so afraid of that. We think of that as socialism. I always want to say, “Have you been to Sweden lately? It doesn’t look so bad.”
WILLIAM BAKER: Well, speaking of books, the next question is for Jacqueline: “People need to be aware that Jacqueline Novogratz’s book, The Blue Sweater, is the most exciting book they could ever read.” That was not written by your mother.
Is that the name of your book, The Blue Sweater?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Yes, it is.
WILLIAM BAKER: What is it about, Jacqueline?
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ: Thank you to whoever sent that. I feel almost embarrassed. I do feel embarrassed.
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The story of The Blue Sweater is actually a story of being given a blue sweater by my uncle when I was ten years old, and wearing it all the time, including into my freshman year in high school, when I had one of those humiliating moments that probably every adolescent girl has, when a boy yelled a lewd comment to me about my sweater and how it fit on my newly curvy figure. So I went home, threw the sweater into the Goodwill with my mother, and never thought about it again.
Until I was building this bank in Rwanda ten years later, and I was jogging through the hills, and I saw this little ten-year-old boy wearing my sweater. So I run up to the child, grab him by the collar, turn it, and there was my name written on the collar of that sweater. Hence the name of the book and the metaphor for how interconnected we are as a world and how our action and inaction can impact people we might never meet every day of our lives.
The book goes from there on a personal journey through wanting to change the world, wanting to save the world, and moving to Africa, and finding that most people don’t want to be saved, certainly not by a kid like I was at that point in my life.
Building this bank in Rwanda with five extraordinary Rwandan women in the name of social justice, and then having to deal with genocide, and discovering that the women played every conceivable role of the genocide, including being major perpetrators of it — in fact, our first executive director ended up being one of the main planners of the genocide.
So having to confront good and evil in the most personal way possible. And then coming up finally with this idea of patient capital, that the only way to create systems — and I think it connects to what Larry was saying — whether it’s about taxation or the private sector or the way we approach charity, the way we love each other, has to recognize that demons and angels exist in every single one of us, and that we need to build systems that really do bring out our angels and suppress the monsters. I am actually incredibly hopeful for an angel-connected world, and I think that we need to get away even from the boundaries of nation that disconnect us, and start seeing ourselves as one tribe, and build systems that find ways to really release the energies of every single one of us on this planet. I think we have the capability of doing so.
34 The Fordham Center On Religion and Culture www.fordham.edu/ReligCulture
To your first or second question, I think we are capable of ending poverty in the next few generations, and there has never been a moment in history like it.
WILLIAM BAKER: I can’t think of a better way and a more powerful way to end this panel. I want to thank the three of you, who are really exceptional people. This has been one of the highlights of my recent life.
I’d like to thank Jackie, I’d like to thank Larry, and I’d like to thank Fred. Really a wonderful job. Thank you.
PETER STEINFELS: Thank you, Bill.
Before all of us perhaps express another round of thanks to our panelists and so many others who have worked behind the scenes for tonight’s Forum, including our Center’s Program Manager, Patricia Bellucci, I want to return us for a moment to the video work, in this case of Michael Foley in Fordham’s Public Affairs Office, and to a recognition of the two people who have in fact inspired this forum, Sister Beatrice Chipeta and Father John Halligan.
[Video presentation]
And so to bring the Forum to a close, once again please join me in warmly thanking Bill Baker, Fred de Sam Lazaro, Jacqueline Novogratz, and Lawrence MacDonald.
[Applause]